THIS DAY IN HISTORY

First European battle on American soil

Spanish forces under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés capture the French Huguenot settlement of Fort Caroline, near present-day Jacksonville, Florida. The French, commanded by Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere, lost 135 men in the first instance of colonial warfare between European powers in America. Most of those killed were massacred on the order of Aviles, who allegedly had the slain hanged on trees beside the inscription “Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” Laudonniere and some 40 other Huguenots escaped.

In 1564, the French Huguenots (Protestants) had settled on the Banks of May, a strategic point on the Florida coast. King Philip II of Spain was disturbed by this challenge to Spanish authority in the New World and sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to Florida to expel the French heretics and establish a Spanish colony there. In early September 1565, Aviles founded San Augustin on the Florida coast, which would later grow into Saint Augustine–the oldest city in North America. Two weeks later, on September 20, he attacked and destroyed the French settlement of Fort Caroline.

ADVERTISEMENT

Thanks for watching!

The decisive French defeat encouraged France to refocus its colonial efforts in America far to the north, in what is now Quebec and Nova Scotia in Canada.

FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

ALSO ON THIS DAY

On this day in 2012, 16 members of a dissident Amish group in Ohio are convicted of federal hate crimes and conspiracy for forcibly cutting the beards and hair of fellow Amish with whom they had religious differences. The government classified the ruthless attacks as hate crimes ...read more

Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sets sail from Spain in an effort to find a western sea route to the rich Spice Islands of Indonesia. In command of five ships and 270 men, Magellan sailed to West Africa and then to Brazil, where he searched the South American coast for a ...read more

The first annual Cannes Film Festival opens at the resort city of Cannes on the French Riviera. The festival had intended to make its debut in September 1939, but the outbreak of World War II forced the cancellation of the inaugural Cannes. The world’s first annual international ...read more

On this day in 1960, California hot rodder Mickey Thompson takes another shot at the world land-speed record. A few weeks earlier, Thompson had become the first American to travel faster than 400 mph on land when he’d piloted his Challenger I (a car that he designed and built ...read more

On this day in 1973, in a highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, beats Bobby Riggs, 55, a former No. 1 ranked men’s player. Riggs (1918-1995), a self-proclaimed male chauvinist, had boasted that women were inferior, that ...read more

The USAF reveals that U.S. planes have been mining the coastal rivers and canals of northern Quang Tri province below the DMZ, the first mining of waterways within South Vietnam. This was an attempt to impede further reinforcement of North Vietnamese forces in the area and to ...read more

Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.

U.S. military spokesmen defend the use of defoliants in Vietnam at a news conference in Saigon, claiming that the use of the agents in selected areas of South Vietnam had neither appreciably altered the country’s ecology, nor produced any harmful effects on human or animal life. ...read more

On September 20, 1973, Billie Jean King defeats Bobby Riggs in a widely publicized exhibition tennis match dubbed the “Battle of the Sexes.” The 55-year-old Riggs, a tennis champion from the late 1930s and 40s who was notoriously skeptical of women’s talents on the tennis court, ...read more

On this day in 1881, Chester Arthur is inaugurated, becoming the third person to serve as president in that year. The year 1881 began with Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in office. Hayes served out his first and only term and officially turned over the reins of government to ...read more

On this day in 1806, after nearly two-and-a-half years spent exploring the western wilderness, the Corps of Discovery arrived at the frontier village of La Charette, the first white settlement they had seen since leaving behind the outposts of eastern civilization in 1804. ...read more

In the autumn of 1975, NBC premiered a brand-new late-night comedy-variety program that in addition to launching the careers of John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and an entire generation of comic actors, would also give America its first exposure to some of the era’s greatest ...read more

On this day, Upton Sinclair, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reformer, is born in Baltimore, Maryland. Sinclair came from a once well-to-do Southern family that had suffered reverses. When he was 10, the family moved to New York. Starting at age 15, he earned money writing dime ...read more

On this day in 1934, Sofia Villani Scicolone, later known to the world as the actress and screen siren Sophia Loren, is born in Rome, Italy. Loren, who was raised in poverty in Naples, rose to become Italy’s most famous film star and an international icon of beauty and glamour. ...read more

A glacial avalanche in Russia buries a village on this day in 2002, killing more than 100 people. The North Ossetia area of Russia was hard hit by floods in June 2002. These floods, along with an early and hot summer, proved to be a precursor to a much larger disaster in ...read more

An optimistic and upbeat President John F. Kennedy suggests that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. The proposal caught both the Soviets and many Americans off guard. In 1961, shortly after his election as president, ...read more

In one of the bloodiest battles of the war, the Confederate Army of Tennessee drives the Union Army of the Cumberland back into Chattanooga, Tennessee, from Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia. Although technically a Confederate victory, the battle had little long-term effect ...read more

On the evening of September 20, 1777, near Paoli, Pennsylvania, General Charles Grey and nearly 5,000 British soldiers launch a surprise attack on a small regiment of Patriot troops commanded by General Anthony Wayne in what becomes known as the Paoli Massacre. Not wanting to ...read more

On September 20, 1918, 32-year-old Colonel George S. Patton of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) writes to his father from the Western Front in France, recounting his experiences during the American-led offensive against the Germans at Saint-Mihiel earlier that month. Patton ...read more